Labor Camp

A labor camp worker remained hospitalized Tuesday after being beaten on the head with a wine bottle.Willie Wheeler, whose age was not available, was flown by helicopter to Orlando Regional Medical Center after he was involved in a fight Monday afternoon at Miller's Labor Camp in Umatilla.An ORMC nursing supervisor said Wheeler was in stable and satisfactory condition Tuesday night.Edward Lee Kirkland, 34, of Church Street, Umatilla, was charged with aggravated battery in connection with the fight.

Henriette Echord Bond, 82, was a strict mother and churchgoing Catholic with a surprising past. As a young girl, she was part of the Polish Underground State, a loosely organized group resisting and undermining the German occupation during World War II. Born Henriette Stefanczyk to a French-Canadian father and Polish mother in Warsaw on Jan 15, 1929, the longtime Eustis resident died on June 5 of cancer and other ailments. Henriette was 10 years old and the youngest child in her family when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, said her son, Jess Echord of Adel, Ga. The family escaped Warsaw to live at her grandmother's farm.

Two democracy campaigners have been sent to labor camps without trial for writing essays critical of the government, a human-rights monitoring group said Saturday. Fu Guoyong, who served two years in a labor camp for taking part in the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations, was sentenced to three more years at a work farm. Chen Ping, an editor of a Shanxi-based magazine Economic Issues, was sentenced to one year in a labor camp. Police in Taiyuan, capital of central Shanxi province, ordered the punishment for an essay Fu wrote in Beijing Spring, a magazine published in North America by exiled dissidents.

When the source material for a play is letters, the words in those letters become paramount. And so it is, in "Letters to Sala," that the audience hears key phrases from the trove of letters collected by a young woman in a Nazi labor camp. Phrases — "remember, there is a God," "if we were free," — repeat and echo until in places the play seems like a poem. A moving, timeless, beautiful poem. "Letters to Sala" tells the story of young Sala Garncarz, a Polish Jew who spent five years in Nazi labor camps during World War II . At the same time, it tells the story of the turmoil unleashed on Sala's family nearly 50 years later when her grown daughter, Ann, first learned of her mother's ordeal.

Labor camp operator Willie Lee Simmons was released from jail Friday, a day after a judge ruled he was entitled to his freedom on bail pending an appeal of his recent conviction.Simmons, 60, of Pomona Park, was sent to jail May 7 after a jury found him guilty of culpable negligence and violating Florida's farm labor laws. The charges stemmed from a Nov. 23 wreck east of Eustis in which four of Simmons' workers died.According to trial testimony, the van the workers were riding in was uninsured and had unsafe seating.

Janine Podczaski was a young woman living in Poland when German troops forced her and her husband into a brutal labor camp to help build ammunition and military planes.It was the most difficult experience of her life, friends said.The Altamonte Springs resident died Sunday of respiratory failure. She was 84.``She was a wonderful, wonderful woman,'' said Helen Schefstad, a close friend. ``She always had a twinkle in her eye and a wink. She will be greatly missed.''Born in Vilna, Poland, Podczaski married Stanislaw Podczaski in 1941, while they were law students.

State labor officials have decided to fine Willie Lee Simmons Sr. $5,000 and revoke his labor camp operating permit after a Lake County accident that killed four of his workers.In an administrative complaint given to Simmons this week, officials with the state Department of Labor and Employment Security cited the Putnam County crew chief with five violations:- Failure to file a vehicle inspection form for the van that was carrying 11 labor camp workers to a White Rose nursery job in Lake County on Nov. 23. Four of those workers were killed and seven others were injured when a tractor-trailer rig ran a stop sign and flashing light, then sheared off the back of the van.Most workers inside were riding on seats made of boards laid across concrete blocks.

A 70-year-old Polish immigrant who claimed he fixed shoes during World War II has been accused of being a guard at a Nazi labor camp where thousands died, the Justice Department said Thursday. The agency's Office of Special Investigations, which tracks down reputed war criminals, said it will seek to have Bronislaw Hajda stripped of his citizenship and deported. Hajda was accused of being an armed guard at the slave labor camp at Treblinka, Poland, from March, 1943 to July, 1944.

A gang of convicts from a Siberian labor camp overpowered their guards aboard an Aeroflot passenger flight, hijacked the plane to Pakistan and sought political asylum Monday. No one was hurt. One of the convicts apparently smuggled weapons on board in an artificial limb, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported. The 11 hijackers surrendered after landing at Karachi airport, and the 29 passengers and nine crew members were freed unharmed. The plane was heading from Neryungry to Yakutsk in eastern Siberia.

Five men were arrested and three burglary cases were possibly solved early Tuesday after a sheriff's tracking dog led police to the suspects, reports at the Lake County Jail said.Hours after a Monday night break-in at the Dollar General Store in north Umatilla, sheriff's K-9 Beano led his handler, Deputy John Conley, to the John Miller Labor Camp on the south end of town.There, a search of dormitory buildings turned up a cache of stolen clothes, cigarettes and other goods taken during the break-in, plus from another burglary at the same store Aug. 1 and a burglary at the Umatilla Shell station Saturday, reports said.

Ann Kirschner was confused by the bundle of faded letters and postcards her mother passed across the kitchen table 20 years ago. For one thing, they were written in German — even though her mother was Polish. "I said, 'What!? What are these?" Kirschner recalls. The letters were the manifestation of a 50-year secret kept by Sala Kirschner. Sala, a native of Poland, had endured years in Nazi work camps during World War II — and smuggled out more than 350 letters, photographs and a diary chronicling her life there.

Sounds like Florida officials are angling to get British tycoon Richard Branson to open his spaceflight company here. Virgin Galactic is one of a number of outfits hoping to put tourists in orbit within a year or two. Execs from the Florida Space Authority have spoken with Branson's reps -- including earlier this month at an event in New Mexico. No word on the next step or if a formal proposal is in the making. The authority, based in Cape Canaveral, was created in the late 1980s to bring space business to Florida.

The president of one of Florida's largest produce companies has offered to help migrant workers whose children recently were born with severe birth defects stay in the area while health officials investigate the cause of the defects, officials said. Don Long, president of Plant City-based Ag-Mart Produce Inc., met with the parents Friday at a church in Immokalee. One baby was born without arms or legs, and another with a partially formed jaw. A girl without a nose and no visible sexual organs died days after birth.

BEIJING -- Chinese authorities said Wednesday that followers of the outlawed Falun Gong sect hanged themselves in a mass suicide at a northeast China labor camp, but they gave conflicting accounts of the number of dead and times of death. A government judicial official in Heilongjiang province, Lan Jingli, said 14 followers died by hanging themselves from bunk beds with sheets at the province's Wanjia labor camp before dawn June 20. Another 11 followers who also tried to take part in the mass suicide were rescued by camp guards, Lan said.

BEIJING -- A Chinese intelligence officer who refused to renounce his belief in the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement died last week after he was confined to a cell at a labor camp and denied medical treatment for two months, a Hong Kong-based human-rights group said Wednesday. Tao Hongsheng, 44, had been serving a three-year term of "thought reform through labor" for protesting the government's crackdown.

OVIEDO - Some students winced and groaned. Some cried. One even went to the school clinic because she felt a pain in her chest. A smartly dressed woman, speaking with a Polish accent, triggered the strong feelings as she recounted her struggle to survive the horrors of the Holocaust. Helen Greenspun, 73, of Longwood, used her painful personal stories to help put a face on the atrocities of Nazi Germany for a group of Tuskawilla Middle School students. Students reeled as Greenspun detailed how Nazis reduced her to a starved, lice-covered girl who was only allowed to bathe once every one or two months.

By night, packs of hunger-maddened dogs fight vicious battles over morsels of rancid meat and other edible unmentionables rotting in the mix-mastered remains of what used to be a trailer camp.By day, toddlers amuse themselves riding tricycles and searching for sodden treasures nestled in the wreckage of their homes, while parents cautiously eye a parade of soldiers, police and uniformed relief officials, still unsure whether arrest and deportation lurk in the flood of good will pouring in from all sides.

EX-NAZI GUARD CONVICTED. An East German court Monday convicted a former Nazi guard of murdering 28 Jewish prisoners at a labor camp in Poland during World War II and sentenced him to life in prison, the state-run news agency ADN said. Jakob Holz, 79, was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his part in killing the workers at the forced labor camp in Radom, Poland.

Janine Podczaski was a young woman living in Poland when German troops forced her and her husband into a brutal labor camp to help build ammunition and military planes.It was the most difficult experience of her life, friends said.The Altamonte Springs resident died Sunday of respiratory failure. She was 84.``She was a wonderful, wonderful woman,'' said Helen Schefstad, a close friend. ``She always had a twinkle in her eye and a wink. She will be greatly missed.''Born in Vilna, Poland, Podczaski married Stanislaw Podczaski in 1941, while they were law students.